First, I hate being bored. I grew up in the era of the internet, and subsequently the attention economy, so I’m well accustomed to having something to distract myself. In fact, I’m finding this true with my work setup of 2x27” monitors, where there’s a sideshow even when I should be paying attention to the main show.

So why is boredom such an important topic? It seems obviously stated, but as I talk to more people I find we don’t talk enough about boredom and its positive potential.

What does your brain do when bored?

The human brain is a fickle organ. But as we do more research, we start to understand the attention mechanisms in the brain and the impact of different events on it. The attention economy works to keep us engaged by producing dopamine in the brain, which keeps us scrolling to get the effect.

Alternatively, boredom has a very different impact on how the brain works. When we get bored, we trigger the default mode network (you can read more about that here). In short, our brain transitions to a different mode where we can reflect, wander, and practice improvement. It’s also a place where we need to train ourselves how to be productively bored; however, it’s important to acknowledge that for some, unstructured boredom can negatively impact their their mental health.

However, when we can productively channel boredom, it often breeds a level of creativity that is difficult to achieve in other scenarios. Boredom is generally regarded as a precursor state to creative: when you allow yourself to wander, the results are often surprising.

I’m a big Christopher Nolan fan, and while I think there are legitimate value statements for AI in different industries, I like his stance on creativity.

Where does the human fit in AI engineering?

I find myself contemplating a number of aspects of creativity with AI including the specific value of humans in the AI loop. I think I’d be in the ballpark if I said people, generally, are not great at repeatable tasks that require a specific quality or activity level. We have systems in process engineering that help humans with repetition, and we’ve learned that you have to be empowered to improve the process to stay engaged (see Kaizen, lean, etc.).

But in AI based engineering, we have a few things:

1. We have more free time. How are we choosing to spend it?

2. We aren’t doing the implementation. If we’re not doing the implementation, what’s our value in the engineering loop?

Here, I regularly posit that our value in the AI system is even more centered on our ability to be creative and think non-linearly. This is where we find those ideas an LLM cannot from existing training, including how we approach a problem or think of a new feature. But this requires us to condition ourselves away from the attention economy and back to being comfortable being bored.

Re-learning to be bored

Currently, I’m focusing on a few things here:

1. Attempting to be more present in after hours. This one is probably the most WIP, I’m still not good at it, but being in the moment allows you to experience both the joys of it, and experience the mini wandering about a smaller problem.

2. Being ‘off the screen’ on longer periods like driving or running. I’m re-discovering that my better ideas are coming when I have the space to combine a few things I’ve read and reflect. I’ll be sharing more about what I’m building later this week.

And the last part, which I’m still exploring, is how I can rapidly capture these thoughts after an event like a run. Speech to text is almost there, I just need to commit to it. I view re-learning how to be effective in this space almost as important as working with AI tools that I’d use after this state.

Hope you’re finding ways to inject boredom in. How are you finding your creative process and self, and being comfortable with boredom in your engineering process? Let me know in the comments!